Lisa Bonchek Adams, a prominent online writer who inspired and provoked readers with her extensive writing on her experience with cancer, died Friday evening.

“The thousands upon thousands who knew and loved Lisa Bonchek Adams … will find it hard to believe that her steely will and indomitable spirit were finally overcome by the disease she had lived with for so many years,” the announcement on her website read. “In keeping with Lisa’s wishes, this web site will be maintained as a resource of Lisa’s writings about metastatic breast cancer, grief and loss, life, and family.”

A Connecticut mother of three, Adams shared her story in more than 176,000 tweets and frequent blog posts. She was treated at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. “I gather up my pump cords, release myself from the wall’s grip,” Adams wrote in a…

Tobacco consumption in America has declined consistently since the surgeon general’s office published its first report in 1965. However, more than 18% of adults still identified as smokers in 2013, and in many states, demand for tobacco is high enough to justify large-scale smuggling operations. In New York, a nation-leading 58% of the cigarette market was smuggled in 2013. The share is so high that it hardly fits the description of an underground market.

Cigarette taxes vary greatly between states, and therefore, so do cigarette prices. According to the recent Tax Foundation report, “Cigarette Taxes and Cigarette Smuggling by State, 2013,” this creates arbitrage opportunities for smugglers — that is, the profiting from asset price differences. As a result, some states have net inflows of smuggled cigarettes, while others report net outflows. Based on smuggled cigarettes consumed as a percentage of total cigarettes consumed in 2013, these are the states…

Inclement weather prevented officials from digging out the remains of the bodies on the Pico de Orizaba volcano, the Weather Network reports, but a second attempt was made Friday.

Authorities believe the bodies could be the victims of a 1959 avalanche that killed three people and that a third corpse could be in the area. Many relatives of other missing climbers have contacted officials about identifying the bodies since the climbers’ shared their discovery. Clothing that may have been preserved in the ice could help forensic experts determine the identities of the deceased climbers.

When it comes to Revolutions, timing may be everything. The Middle East has now endured four years of uprisings with no peaceful end in sight, in part because it had the historical misfortune of entering a revolutionary moment at the same time that the U.S. — and the wider Western world — was marked by its own profound period of political and economic dysfunction.

This isn’t just a historical lesson. As Congress debates whether to give President Obama a new AUMF (Authorization for Use of Military Force), and as the 2016 presidential hopefuls propose their solutions to America’s foreign policy challenges, we need to determine what needs to be done differently, now that our economy is on a growth path, even if our politics remain dysfunctional.

When long-time dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled Tunis on January 14, 2011, the United States was in its ninth year of post-9/11…